How many civil wars were there in Iraq after the U.S. invasion – and how did they really end? Roger Petersen of MIT describes a life of immersion, from road construction to honchoing a network of scholar-soldiers as they unspooled the complexity of a decade of war in Iraq. How does one get honest answers out of warlords in situations where they (and their entourage) have all the power? Is it possible to be a neutral observer in an ongoing war? Can ethnographicsensibility be taught -- and if not, as the profession incentivizes students to become technically-oriented in our training sequences, what is lost? Provocative, funny, blunt, and always thoughtful, Petersen's slow-rolled delivery is calibrated to get you wondering what you might learn if you got serious about active listening.

Wendy Pearlman is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, where she is Crown Professor of Middle East Studies. She studies the comparative politics of the Middle East, social movements, and forced migration, and has conducted with more than 500 displaced Syrians since 2012.  In this podcast we discuss how this data was curated ("midwife-ing") to create the award-winning We Crossed A Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria (HarperCollins, 2017).  

Kristine Eck (Uppsala University) discusses the challenges of working with contemporary and historical police archives.  For quantitative social scientists, how does "the data generation process" introduce measurement bias into the processes that we are actually describing when we employ data generated by the state for counterinsurgency?  How do ongoing state efforts to digitize archives aid and hinder political scientists and data scientists trying to quantify human rights abuses?  What are the citation norms for private correspondence by public figures who were in command decision roles during episodes of violence?  A frank, eye-opening discussion on how scholars access and use state-generated datasets on repression, with comparative cases ranging from the Malayan Emergency to Israel and from contemporary OECD countries to Nepal. 

Ana Bracic (Michigan State University) discusses positionality, entree, and a variety of ethical considerations that informed her work with a highly-vulnerable population in Central Europe.  The candid discussion of how her project on the Roma evolved from an idealized, perfect "magical dataset" ("something as ridiculous as a time-series cross-section dataset on some sort of dimension of Roma exclusion, and it didn't matter what it was, so long as it was the same one across all these observations...") to her actual project.  How was her mother an asset?  What happens if you come home from the field with data that, once analyzed, is shown to be completely unhelpful for your job market paper?  A can't miss episode for an aspiring junior scholar.

The author of Rule and Revenue, In the Interests of Others, Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism, and Analytic Narratives describes some of her lesser-known her early-career work: police ride-alongs in Detroit after the social upheavals of the 1960s, interviewing Jimmy Hoffa, and day-drinking with scary police officers (before they went on duty).  A wide-ranging discussion of triangulating data to tell a compelling story, how and when to alter theories in the face of new data, and numerous inspiring examples of tenacity in the face of adversity dealing with hard-to-access archives.  With generous answers, always more cogent and coherent than the questions, this is truly a can't miss episode.

Sarah Parkinson (Johns Hopkins) blunt and honest reflections on how her dissertation project evolved over more than a decade is a reminder that the field is supposed to change the scholar -- not always in ways that can be predicted in advance.  Parkinson discusses her evolutions, both in terms of methods employed and her social identification in the discipline.  There is something here that will be valuable to every young scholar, especially those considering work in areas adjacent to violence.  What does it mean to study the state from the bottom-up?  What do we, privileged observers, owe our most vulnerable subjects, really?  The second guest in the ARC (Advancing Research on Conflict) Consortium.